Hi,
I am getting mixed results from my research on dealer prep and battery charging. Some posts on this forum say that dealer prep should be a few days to fully charge the battery yet when i called 3 dealers, they say that it depends on the charger...On average, the dealers say that the battery is charged for anywhere between 30 min and 90 min....Is this correct? Will a battery charged for 1 hour be sufficient to last the entire lifetime of the battery?\
I use my bike every day so there is no issue of it just sitting there discharghing....
The problem im having (as stated in a previous post) is that every morning i get hit with a 0003 r.SW error relating to low battery...bike is only 6 months old...2009 M696
Anybody shed some light on dealer prep and battery charhing....? Thanks!
Having worked for a dealer (until they went broke and closed) We had a fairly potent charger and from putting the liquid in the new battery, to fully charged it took 3 hours, The first thing we did was put the liquid in the battery and throw it on the Charger while the best of the bike was prepped and made ready, by the time the bike was ready and clean, we would pop the battery in and away we would go.
we used to get maybe 1 in 10 new batteries fail with 12 months, mine did it, it was replaced under warranty.
but while it was failing, it tested fine, but it would wreak havoc on the charging system and ECU, it lead the Techs on a wild merry chase trying to figure out the problem, error codes, ECU light on one trip, off the next.
But what threw them was the bike started and charged as normal.
fitted new battery, all problems gone and it's been fine ever since, I also bought a battery tender to maintain the battery if I am not going to use the bike for a while.
What the tech should be doing in a perfect world is measuring open cell voltage. This tells the tech the state of charge. If the battery is a 10 AH battery, like in your bike, and the battery is 75% charged, the tech needs to put 2.5 amps (25%) back in. How long this takes depends the charging rate. If you are charging the battery at .75 amps it would take 3.33 hours to fully charge the battery, 2 amp charging rate would take 1.25 hours until full charge.
What most techs in dealers do in the real world is what many of us do at home, put it on some sort of smart charger that lights an indicator and goes into a "float" mode when the battery reaches full charge to avoid over charging.
If your battery was stone dead when the bike arrived in the shop and it took three days to charge the charging rate would be .139 amps, not a realistic number, plus your battery was not stone dead.